Pokémon GO! The Wonders of Nature

Consider this. It’s a warm and beautiful day outside. The sun is shining and the birds are singing. You want to get outside and do something but you aren’t sure what quite yet. You decide to hop on your bike and head to the park. You love the park, with all of its birds and trees and nature walks. It’s hard to find great places like this one in the city in which you live, so whenever you can, you go to the park. When you get there, you begin to tune into sounds and sights that you normally night not see if you weren’t paying attention. Once you’ve dialed in, you notice so many wonderful and natural things and begin to classify them in your brain. “Too bad there isn’t a video game for something like this,” you think to yourself. “If there was, I would play it all day!”.

Just when you thought that you would need to buy a virtual reality headset and pay tons of money in order to experience the outdoors like this, along comes Pokémon Go and it completely reshapes your world. Released in July 2016 and downloaded more than five million times in less than two months, this smartphone game is creating quite a buzz. I still remember playing Pokemon on my Gameboy when I was just a child. It’s incredible how this has now expanded on that phenomenon, the best-selling card game, and how this app treats its players to adventures in the outdoors.

Take your mobile device with you and root out and capture different species of Pokémon creatures and gain points and ranking as you do. There are about one hundred fifty-one different species in Pokémon Go. Some are easy to find and are very common and might take you no time at all to discover, while others are extremely difficult to find, leading you on a day’s journey just to find that one special little pocket monster.

It is said that one hundred forty-two of them are discoverable in the United States, three more in international regions, and six characters that, up to this point, have not yet been found. Imagine then, deciding to find those missing six characters. Imagine where you might go and what you might see. The possibilities are endless and the opportunity for travel is astounding.

Who would have thought that a little game like Pokémon Go could offer the player the tools to travel the world, classifying and categorizing various species of animals, just like scientists do, all over the planet? Now think about the way the different environments that are in play. Certain Pokémon characters only appear near lakes or rivers. Some only reside in the mountains or in forests. This inadvertently teaches players of biomes and natural habitats, which is amazing and educational at the same time. They also vary in terms of population, just like certain species that actually exist in the world, and sometimes one type of Pokémon character will evolve into another, mimicking evolution of the species on our planet! With all of this variety, imagine the places you’ll go to catch your wild Pokémon!

Whatever you do, don’t miss out on your chance to play this game. As much as we enjoy sitting at home playing Battlefield 1, this is a good chance to step outside and get some exercise in! Download Pokémon Go, pack a bag with some food and water and maybe a sweater, call a friend and get out there! Here’s some motivation before you step out into the wild for your own adventure –